Monthly Archives: November 2013

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Many Jews “have experienced a diluted, dumbed-down version, and understandably found it uninspiring”

Who are these ignorant Jews? The highly educated, socially conscious, comedy-loving, Holocaust-honoring 1.2 million American Jews who identify themselves as Jews of no religion, according to the Pew survey. This group has been steadily growing for four decades and now includes one-third of all adult Jews born after 1980. Four-fifths of this group marry non-Jews. Only 8 percent raise their kids to be Jewish. The majority of them feel little or no attachment to Israel.

I call them ignorant because they’ve turned their back on something they don’t even know. Many have never been exposed to Judaism at all; others have experienced a diluted, dumbed-down version, and understandably found it uninspiring. I don’t blame them for consequently writing off the whole religion, but it’s like writing off sushi after trying a rubbery tuna roll from 7-Eleven.

Salvador Litvak, “Jewish Ignorance is a Disease, You Are the Cure”, The Jewish Journal (1-7 November 2013), 12.

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The polar views of God as a demanding judge and an all-compassionate parent live in tension

The polar views of God as a demanding judge (on the one hand) and an all-compassionate parent (on the other) live in tension. We ought to act as if God does indeed demand that we rise to the occasion of deserving deliverance. At the same time, God knows, as we do, that perfection is beyond us, and when we are about to give up hope, we should remember that God really does offer unconditional love in the end.

All of this matters — not because of God but because theological models are templates for the way we humans, made in God’s image, are supposed to behave…. The expectations that govern God’s relationship with us should exemplify the ground rules of our relationships with others.

In practice, we are held to the highest standards when it comes to people who depend upon us or who otherwise come into our orbit: we must apologize especially to those we love, and strive to do whatever we can to correct the behavior that hurts them. But if we are on the receiving end of these relationships — if friends and family ask pardon of us, that is — we ought not to be unreasonably demanding of them. Rather, like God, we can welcome them back with the good grace of love that asks nothing beyond their sincere overture across the divide that separates us.

Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, “A Song of God’s Grace”, The Jewish Week (6 September 2013), 56.

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How intermarried women and men experience parenthood is essential to increasing the likelihood that they will raise children to identify as Jews

How intermarried women and men experience parenthood is essential to increasing the likelihood that they will raise children to identify as Jews. When a Jewish woman intermarries and becomes a parent and when a Jewish man intermarries and becomes a parent, their experiences are different. The influence of becoming a parent on their respective Jewish identities, however, is surprisingly similar. Jewish identity is maintained, transformed, and reinvented in ways that are authentically meaningful to people who self-identify as Jewish and intermarry.

Keren McGinity, “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle: How the Gender of the Jewish Parent Influences Intermarriage”, AJS Perspectives (Spring 2013), 42.

“There’s a big difference between building bridges across cultures to foster understanding and building bridges so you can run across and ransack the other side”

Most modern-day Protestant fundamentalists believe that the Jews are (at least until Jesus’ return) God’s chosen people. If Christ himself was Jewish, and followed Jewish tradition, the thinking goes, why shouldn’t Christians consider the ways their savior actually lived and practice the rituals he practiced? Many evangelicals have traded contempt of the past for a respectful, almost fetishistic view of Jews and, now, Jewish tradition. What this means in practice is extremely complicated. There’s a big difference between building bridges across cultures to foster understanding and building bridges so you can run across and ransack the other side.

Maud Newton, “Oy Vey, Christian Soldiers”, The New York Times Magazine (24 March 2013), 49.

Restoration of the dead to life mentioned in the Bible

In Isa. xxvi, 19, a restoration of the dead to life is mentioned. ‘Thy dead shall live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of light, and the earth shall cast forth thy dead.’ In these words are discerned the earliest traces of the idea of a national resurrection. The prophet speaks of the time when calamity will overtake Israel’s enemies. Israel will endure long suffering, however, before the time of their inevitable vindication in the eyes of the nations comes (chapters xxv-xxvi). Nevertheless, it will come, and with it, will take place the return to life of numerous generations.

A. Melinek, “The Doctrine of Reward and Punishment in Biblical and Early Rabbinic Writings,” in Essays Presented to Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. H.J. Zimmels, J. Rabbinowitz, & I. Finestein (London: The Soncino Press Limited, 1967), 282.

Every magazine is addressed to a readership for whom what the magazine presents as attained is in truth aspirational

Every magazine is addressed to a readership for whom what the magazine presents as attained is in truth aspirational: Seventeen is read by twelve-year-olds, and no playboy has ever read Playboy. The explicit goal of the National Geographic Society, and of its house journal, was to show the world to the worldly, to enlarge the map, to support exploration with grants and medals. But the real task of National Geographic was to show white people who rarely got far from Cincinnati or San Francisco what lay beyond their ken.

Adam Gopnik, “Yellow Fever”, The New Yorker (22 April 2013), 104.